Updated Fuzzy Legacy Math

SWTOR's patch 1.3 landed today.  I'd previously posted about the questionable pricing of a character-specific companion affection perk, so I figured an update was in order. 

The issue with these perks is that there is a relatively limited amount of total affection each character will get during their career, the perks do NOT apply across your entire legacy, and each point of affection can be assigned a value in credits based on the cost of gifts.  Paying a large number of credits for an exp bonus that cannot be earned any other way - thus saving you time in leveling - is a luxury item.  Paying a large amount of credits for an affection bonus when you could have just purchased enough gifts to get that much affection for a smaller amount of credits is just bad planning.

Anyway, in response Bioware tweaked the numbers - the bonus has been doubled and the cost slashed by 2.5-fold.  The good news is that the entry level perks are a very attractive deal, especially for newer characters.  (The deal gets worse as you complete more of the story, because you will have fewer remaining quests to benefit from the bonus.)  At 10K each for 10% bonuses to gifts and conversation gains, I'm not going to spend too long worrying about whether I got the best deal.

Unfortunately, I'm still not convinced about the higher ranks.  It's an extra 30K credits (per bonus) for an additional 10% affection, but my guess is that you will most likely cap out your affection with most or all of your companions before you really benefit from this increase.  I guess the real question is whether +20% to conversations would allow you to slash or eliminate your gift budget - you will definitely profit from a single rank of the gift perk if you're handing out rank 1 gifts until they stop awarding points, but this will still cost you some money (roughly 30K credits per companion for the non-picky companions).  Then again, the numbers are probably close enough that it doesn't really matter.

If you're curious, here's an update to my numbers on how much you can save on rank 1 and 2 vendor gifts with the 10% bonus. 

Affection Range	Affection/Gift	Total Gifts
0-1999 (base)	96	21 (to 2016)
0-1999 (+10%)	105.6	19 (to 2006.4)
2000-3999 (base)	48	42 (from 2016 to 4032)
2000-3999 (+10%)	52.8	38 (from 2016 to 4012.8)
4000-5999 (base)	19	104 (from 4032 to 6008)
4000-5999 (+10%)	20.9	96 (from 4012.8 to 6019.2)
6000-7999 (base - rank 2 gifts)	19	105 (from 6008 to 8003)
6000-7999 (+10% - rank 2 gifts)	20.9	95 (from 6019.2 to 8004.7)

 Total Saved on Rank 1 Gifts: 6+6+8 = 20 x 200 creds =  4000 creds saved per companion (assuming non-picky companions)

SWTOR Ding 50

Aldabaran, my SWTOR trooper, hit level 50 this evening.  SWTOR is now the seventh MMO in which I have reached a current level cap, and this is my 10th character to reach a current level cap.  (Three of those characters have yet to catch up with level cap increases, leaving me with seven max level characters in five games currently.)  All told, I took about 2.5 weeks' worth of gametime beyond the included 30 days to reach the cap.

I was originally going to hold off in favor of working on alts, but I changed my mind because I was close to the cap and having a hard time figuring out how many of my credits I needed to save for when I got there.  (Answer: 110K+ in training alone, and I haven't decided how to spend my commendations versus what item mods to purchase.) 

Meanwhile, the Jeutrémie legacy is sitting at level 6, and currently grants the following benefits:

• 150 presence (human racial plus 5 companions)
• All five Companion archetype buffs (1% each HP, accuracy, crit, surge, and 2% healing)
• Heroic moment ability duration doubled, cooldown reduced by 25%, one Trooper legacy Sticky Grenade per cycle
• All classes get the trooper/bounty hunter buff (5% endurance)
• Cyborg race unlocked for Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Sith Inquisitor classes, also additional cosmetic options available

One additional tidbit that is tangentially Legacy related - SWTOR allows cross-faction mail within your legacy (not sure if this is limited to after you unlock the Legacy around level 30).   This means I can use my crewskills - Biochem, Slicing, and Bioanalysis - for the benefit of my alts.  Because SWTOR has NPC gathering missions, I don't need to travel to a mid-level planet to get the materials for mid-level medpacs and implants.  Instead, I can just pay companions to go get the stuff for me, AFK for a while (or sign out) and craft it when I get back. 

Anyway, with these benefits in hand, it's off to work on my first alt, a Sith Warrior.  And perhaps return to the trooper from time to time to blow things up for the Republic and/or credits in support of my Legacy.  The trooper was not a class I was that interested in until I played it, but I'm glad that I did, as its medium range melee/tanking niche was different and fun.   If I'm similarly surprised by other specs, I've got a lot more fun left to have with this game. 

Legacy Chapter 3

My trooper, newly renamed from "Aldebaran" to "Aldabaran" due to the server transfers, hit another milestone this afternoon while I was babysitting the dog and some house painters.  I powered through the Corellia class quests in one sitting,  completing the third and final Chapter of the Trooper class story.  I started the afternoon as a freshly dinged level 47, and ended with a 95% full exp bar... toward level 48.  This means that I "need" to scrape together just over two more levels' worth of exp using the non-story quests I skipped, possibly the Hoth Bonus series, and the abridged storyline on Ilum. 

I airquote need because I don't actually feel any especially pressing need to hit the level cap.  I already have all five companion legacy unlocks (3 are maxed for extra crafting bonuses and the other two are close).  With the class story complete, I have my legacy ability unlocked.  I hit legacy level 5 and paid for the human racial legacy bonus because it is a decent bonus to solo play but I'd rather give up half a million credits than wait out 50 levels as a human to obtain it.  The one bonus I would obtain for getting this character to 50 is the racial unlock for Cyborgs, which opens up the race for all classes.  However, I don't really plan on doing another Cyborg in the near future. 

As a solo player, the biggest argument I have for sticking it out on this character is probably that it's easier to earn credits at higher level, which can be used to pay for gifts for companions on my new alts.  Somehow, this seems less pressing than experiencing a whole new story - or seven. 

Explaining SWTOR Server Merges

My post from yesterday on SWTOR's "character transfer" program has gotten a fair amount of attention, including blockquotes at Tobold's and the MMO Melting Pot, who asks whether the game has shrunk by 90%.  To be clear, I don't think the population numbers are that low - at least not yet. 

We already knew that the game was down over a quarter of its population.  Due to the game's pre-launch guild deployment program, those losses were very likely to cluster on the newly added servers in the launch rush, as launch guilds stayed put on the pre-launch servers they were placed on.  As a result, losing 25% of players could leave more than 25% of servers with undesirably low populations.  If players were disproportionately leaving servers that never filled up to begin with, and new players (like myself) were disproportionately choosing the most popular servers that remained, it is easy to see how a lot of servers wound up in trouble. 

There are also some reasons beyond avoiding the M-word for PR reasons why transfers were used over mergers.  With transfers, it's up to the player choosing to transfer to make sure that any characters they already have on the destination server do not push them over the cap.  With a voluntary transfer in place of an involuntary merge, responsibility for loss of a name can also be pushed on the player who "asked".  In principle, some of the servers that were flagged as origin servers could still be saved down the line, though I think it is more likely that the stragglers will end up merged on a server that has room for them once they're down to manageable numbers. 

That said, the sheer numbers of servers in play, combined with the previous population trend and the abrupt talk of free to play do not bode well.  We already knew that the game was going to an unlimited free trial model through level 15 - currently seen in WoW and Rift - and that in principle means they are laying the groundwork for non-subscription access to the servers. 

Alternate Payment Model
One final thought - when I heard the news from E3, I immediately assumed paid mini-expansion based on some past rumors regarding a survey that EA circulated on this topic.  It sounds like they denied this rumor in press interviews, and perhaps for good reason.  This idea has been tried before and never goes over well in a subscription game, especially within its first year of release.  However, perhaps there is a way to make mini-expansions more like DLC - as an alternative to the subscription rather than an add-on. 

DLC has far greater acceptance amongst players in general and Bioware fans in particular.  What if, by "free to play", we mean that regular paid mini-expansions come with enough game time - at a discount that offsets the cost of the content for subscribers - to allow most players to beat the content?  If for some reason you aren't done and don't wish to subscribe in the interim, you'd be free to revisit the stuff when the next DLC arrives with more included game time.  It would still be a subscription game and you would still need to offer value for that option, but there may be some middle ground/hybrid model that hasn't been done before and that might work with the kind of content Bioware is producing.  Time will tell, I suppose. 

Surveying SWTOR Servers

SWTOR players have been asking for server transfers basically since the game's first month, and they have finally arrived.  The analysis that we're seeing on the forums is fascinating.

As expected, these appear to be thinly-veiled server mergers, with as many as sixteen sparsely populated "origin" servers invited to transfer to a single "destination" server.  The thing that has surprised me is how aggressive Bioware-Mythic is being.  By my count of US servers as of this evening, there are 10 servers that Bioware intends to save (destinations), 23 servers with unknown fates (neither origin nor destination as of yet), and a whopping 90 servers that Bioware appears to be writing off (origins). 

On the one hand, I tip my hat to Bioware for ripping the bandaid off.  On a day when I should have been celebrating - level 46, Legacy level 5, and 100 presence for purchasing the human racial legacy unlock - I was instead doing damage control.  I lost about 15K credits in auction deposits (I knew I had to cancel auctions but did not realize that your deposit is only refunded if you wait until the sale expires) and had to rename my character - I may or may not end up regretting not changing his name more dramatically if I end up sending stuff to the guy who has my old name on my destination server.  I've heard many stories of players losing multiple character names.  The only thing worse than doing this once would be doing it repeatedly as servers close one by one over time. 

That said, we're looking at closure of anywhere from 75-90% of US servers depending on how the undecideds break.  Perhaps Bioware has been able to optimize or improve hardware to accommodate more players per server, especially with the launch rush redistributed (albeit primarily to a handful of endgame-relevant locations).  Perhaps part of their decision to open so many servers at launch was motivated by a belief that populations would continue to expand, rather than contract, and they are now firmly in consolidation mode.  Even so, Bioware-Mythic now appears to hold the dubious distinction of the top two slots on the list of "most servers closed by a MMO", so something clearly did not go right.


P.S. A tip for those of you who are re-locating: I would suggest creating or leaving a low level alt on the server/legacy you are departing.  This may be moot if the origin servers close soon and the remaining characters are sent to the same destination as the current transfers.  However, in the event that the last stragglers on your old server get sent somewhere else, they can potentially take a copy of your legacy (as it was when you departed) with them - if you have no characters left, presumably nothing will transfer.  A minute in the character generator on a server you're leaving for good is probably worthwhile if it gets you more options to play on in the future. 

Fuzzy Legacy Math

Update (26 June): The patch is live, see this post for updated numbers.  Bottom line: the first ranks are now worthwhile for most characters, but the higher end bonuses are still probably a bad deal.


SWTOR patch 1.3 has hit the test servers, bringing a new round of various legacy bonuses.  The numbers may change in testing, but they did get me thinking about how some things that sound good on paper don't work out so well.

I did a fair amount of math, summarized below, trying to figure out if the companion gift affection bonus was ever worth purchasing.  The answer is extremely borderline, because the bonus is per-character, there is a limited amount of affection you can earn on each character, and the only way to "cash in" the bonus is to consume a gift that has a cash value.  In order to profit from a 5% affection bonus that costs 25K credits to unlock, you need to be spending over 100K credits per companion for each of your five companions.  This is technically possible if you intend to powergrind each companion from 0-10,000 as quickly as possible using vendor gifts and paying whatever it costs on the trade network.  Most people probably will not do this.

I got sufficiently into the analysis of this that I lost sight of the bigger picture.  There are two additional ranks and these boost the costs even further - a total of 250K credits for the top rank.  It's also worth noting that the two perks for conversation gains and gift gains are somewhat mutually diminishing in value - due to the cap, the more affection you gain from one of the two, the less remaining affection there is to gain from the other.  (The conversation option has the advantage that players will do this anyway - you still have to earn more affection than you could buy with the credits for this to be worthwhile, but at least you don't have to be planning to spend an unreasonable total amount on gifts to profit from it.) 

Don't get me wrong, some of the new legacy unlocks are legitimate luxury item credit sinks.  These particular bonuses, though, especially for the top two ranks, are never worth the money for anyone.  As with your real money, I suppose the lesson is "buyer beware". 

The numbers
The chart below summarizes the cost of power-grinding the 80% of companions who have at least one gift they "love" for maximum favor using vendor gifts.  You can get from 0-8000 affection for under 100K credits using gifts from the vendor - which means that the 5% bonus you paid 25K credits for saves you fewer than 5K credits per companion.  If your crewskills and/or the auction house are more cost-effective than the vendor - or if you are less excessive in your use of gifts, you will save even less.   

Affection Range	Affection/Gift	Total Gifts
0-1999 (base)	96	21 (to 2016)
0-1999 (+5%)	100.8	20 (to 2016)
2000-3999 (base)	48	42 (from 2016 to 4032)
2000-3999 (+5%)	50.4	40 (from 2016 to 4032)
4000-5999 (base)	19	104 (from 4032 to 6008)
4000-5999 (+5%)	19.95	99 (from 4032 to 6007.5)
6000-7999 (base - rank 2 gifts)	19	105 (from 6008 to 8003)
6000-7999 (+5% - rank 2 gifts)	19.95	100 (from 6008 to 8001.55)

Total Rank 1 cost saved: 8 rank one green gifts (1600 credits) per companion, 8000 credits for five companions (assuming none who are picky)
Total Rank 2 cost saved: 5 rank two green gifts (3000 credits) per companion, 15000 credits for five companions (assuming none who are picky)
Total "saved": 23000 credits
Total Spent to earn these savings: 25,000 credits.

Legacy Chapter 2

My SWTOR trooper cleared out the finale of Chapter 2, hit level 40 (along with Legacy Level 3) early in the Chapter 3 content, and unlocked a bunch of goodies. All characters on my legacy now get:

• +2% Bonus to healing received
• +1% Bonus to surge (affects critical multiplier)
• +20 Presence (improves all Companion stats)
• Heroic Moment, normally a 20 minute cooldown that lasts 1 minute, now lasts 24 seconds longer and has a cooldown that is two minutes shorter.  (This will be a more significant buff when I complete Chapter 3 on one or more classes for bonus abilities.)  
• Trooper Class Buff: +5% endurance (grants HP) to any class that does not already have the trooper/bounty hunter buff from another source (e.g. party member, drive-by buff from a player, being a trooper/BH)
• Trooper emote

None of these things are game-breaking, though I can imagine the presence numbers adding up for a player who has enough companions unlocked.  Still, it's kind of fun that I already get to take advantage of some Legacy bonuses even though this is my first character.

Min-Maxing Affection
Part of the reason why I was able to top out two of my five companions immediately upon starting Chapter 3 (required to unlock all conversations) was through efforts to min-max companion affection using some web resources (note: links contain companions' names, if you still think that's a spoiler). 

Dulfy's guide contains two crucial pieces of information - each companion's favorite gifts and how much total affection each companion needs to cap out.  My strategy was to throw tier 1 gifts that each companion views as a "favorite" at them as soon as possible until each companion hits 6000 affection.    (Psynister has some tips on how to deal with the handful of characters who do not have any "favorite" gifts.)  I wasn't quite able to afford this much of a headstart on all of my companions because this was my first character, but this is a huge bonus for the ones that I was able to pursue - said companions only needed 2000-3500 to the maximum required affection, rather than 8000-9500 that companions starting from scratch require.

Beyond 6000 affection, gifts begin to become costly - the tier 2 vendor gifts cost three times as much and are only good for 19 affection once you're above 6000, while higher end gifts are more difficult to obtain (or costly on the exchange).  Assuming that you don't have indefinite numbers of credits to throw at this problem, the solution is questing with a site such as TORhead open so that you can always determine which dialog choices will award the most affection.  This approach does mean spoilers, but it can make a huge difference - picking the correct dialog with the correct companion out can be worth over a hundred points, where the incorrect companion gets absolutely nothing for the same amount of work.

I suppose such is the paradox of removing choices that irreversibly affect gameplay - when all that are left are "moral" choices that your companions will always forgive by spending credits on gifts, these reversible choices are what is left to min-max.

P.S. In principle, Human is the optimal race for a first character in SWTOR because it is the only race that has any non-cosmetic benefit - another 100 points to presence (which is almost exclusively a solo stat).  However, I opted to go with more interesting races instead, as the human racial unlock is the cheapest to purchase.  I'm already over halfway to the requisite 500K credits and at Legacy level 3 out of a required 5. 

P.P.S. EA's press conference at E3 announced what sounds like a mini-expansion to SWTOR.  Perhaps it's early yet, but I have not seen the word "free", which makes me think that they plan to be the latest MMO to suffer extreme backlash for attempting to charge for content within the first year of service.  Dulfy reports that there was a survey that may have been attempting to determine pricing/features for this update.  One intriguing item was the idea of including game time in the price of the mini-expansion.  Depending on pricing, this could be a good thing (effectively free for subscribers, while console players who are more tolerant of non-subscription DLC get some time to use the content Bioware is potentially selling) or a bad thing (forced to buy game time along with the thing as a way to inflate the price). 

Level versus /played

Via Massively comes an interesting tidbit of Warhammer Online news.  Beyond the first fifteen levels, the game will now use the RVR Reknown level, rather than the PVE character level system for RVR scenario matchmaking.  Characters with a low PVE level will be bolstered up to some baseline while in the scenario, while higher PVE-level players with low reknown ranks will remain what's functionally a training bracket until they rank up. 

It's an interesting concept.  In PVP in general, player skill is going to play a larger role compared to /played time, and that effect is only amplified if the player spends their leveling time in (possibly solo) PVE content.  Depending on how well Warhammer has tamed the AFK problem, the time to Reknown rank 70 may actually be enough to train newbies to play with the veterans. 

On the downside, last I checked Reknown rank was character-specific rather than account-wide.  Players who really know what they are doing are potentially trapped in the training bracket for 69 levels - it's not clear to me from the patch notes whether level 40 players can group up with their friends and queue together as a group, or whether these folks will be split by reknown rank.  By the same token, someone who really likes steam-rolling newbies could presumably serially re-roll to stay in the entry level bracket and feast on the tears. 

This may be a moot point in the context of a game that's down to its last server (or two, I've lost track) simultaneously rolling out a stand-alone spinoff version of the scenario gameplay in a free to play somewhat-level-less MOBA.  Faults with the execution aside, though, separating players by some measure of skill rather than time /played may be a sound concept, especially for PVP, and it'll be interesting to see who steals it in the future. 

Marginal Return on Content

Anjin asks whether the layoffs at Bioware are a sign of trouble or business as usual.  I'd suggest the answer is a bit of both - losing staff is business as usual for a game that lost about a quarter of its customers in the previous quarter.  This move comes at about the game's five month mark, which is a bit late for the traditional ship-then-sack treatment.  At a minimum, the game's subscription performance can't have helped their case to keep more people on board.  That said, the game is still the number two subscription MMO at the moment, which would seem to make it a bit early to be abandoning ship.

The more concerning possibility, then, is that EA does not like what they're seeing in terms of return on investment for new content.  We know from the beta that Bioware has great tools in place to map out how content is used.  These tools may now be telling them that daily quests aren't helping them retain players who are out of story content.  Meanwhile, my experience has been that the solo content on a planet runs for a couple of hours, which can't be a great return on the development investment needed to create that much content. 

Overall, it is going to be very interesting to see whether the game ever focuses on advancing the solo story content beyond its current set of endings, or whether they continue to focus on quality of life features and concede that players will simply leave as they finish the story.  

What Diablo III Is and Is Not

Reading over the blogs, I wonder if Blizzard's biggest mistake with Diablo III was keeping the name.  This is not to say that players have not cited valid reasons for their lack of enthusiasm, but it feels like a disproportionate amount of the commentary has focused on what the game is not. 

Diablo III is not (note: cited complaints are not the whole contents of the linked posts):

• Available offline (see: Syp amongst many others after the rocky launch week)
• Sufficiently different in scenery from DII.  (See: Wilhelm)
• Sufficiently similar in character skill design from DII.  (See Pete, more on this in a minute)
• A game, but more of an interactive movie (See: Gevlon)
• Being evaluated fairly by reviewers, but rather being given a bonus based on its title (See Tobold)
• Reasonable about unlocking difficulty - three complete playthroughs are required to unlock the highest difficulty (See: Spinks)
• Arriving in 2002, when the incremental improvements from DII would be more consistent with four years versus the fourteen it actually took.  (See: Ferrel)
• Torchlight 2 (Pete, Arbitrary, several others - I suppose a real credit to Runic that this was such a common observation.)

So far, I've only played through level 11, but from what I've seen so far DIII is a good quality, polished, and fun game.  In some ways, it reminds me of SWTOR - you are definitely experiencing someone else's story, between the heavy involvement of NPC's and the relatively non-customizeable player characters, but the story experience and production values have been excellent.  Two tidbits that I've especially enjoyed:

Voiceover Lore: Those lore tidbits normally found in books that I never read in game?  In DIII, they are saved to my journal and an NPC will read them to me as I continue on my path of destruction.  As a result, I've been exposed to far more lore than I would ordinarily be tracking this early in the game.  This system is a huge step forward from tweet-length boxes of quest text.  Every MMO that is not planning on Bioware-style branching dialog trees needs to look at this.

Skill system: I am solidly in Camp Spinks on this one.  DII had one of the worst implementations of a skill system that I can ever remember tolerating - with no respecs and no requirement to spend more than one point per low level skill, DII basically dictated that players not use any skill points until most of the way through the game's normal difficulty.  In its place, Blizzard has created a system that offers tactical versatility without the dead weight and false choices - many options and almost all of them bad.  With the new system, I'm re-building my character in some way almost every level, and it sounds like I'm not alone in that experience.

Do I expect to be playing DIII every day for months or years?  No.  But that's another thing that DIII is not and does not need to be - a MMO with a lengthy commitment. 

(P.S. My tag-thing for contacting me in game is pvdblog#1183.) 

SWTOR At One Month

My first month in SWTOR has just about wound up - minus some time due to real life scheduling conflicts but plus a few days due to the referral trial program.

My first character is sitting at level 34, having completed the class story on Balmorra and collected four of my five companions.  This means that I'm done with seven of the twelve planets I will visit as part of my class story (not counting Ilum, which is PVP only as far as I'm aware).

There is still solo content left on about half of the planets I have visited, but I have chosen to forge ahead as my level permits in the name of preserving challenge.  I'm continuing to tackle content that's 2-3 levels above my head in search of an appropriate difficulty level.  In principle, this all means that my next Republic character could have a significant amount of content that I have not seen previously (assuming that I don't go back and power through the old stuff to farm companion affection for legacy unlocks).

Based on this timeline and rate of advancement, I'm probably looking at about six weeks of real time per level 50 character, and about four playthroughs (two per faction, and, coincidentally enough, one for each mirrored class pairing) before I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel for content I have yet to complete.  I have not yet started a single alt due to how the Legacy system rewards work, but to Bioware's credit the only hard part about my next character will be the choice of which of the six classes (excluding Bounty Hunter because it's the mirror of my Trooper) to play next.

Is it ideal for Bioware if I ultimately pay for six months' worth of game time before wandering off into the double-sunset?  Perhaps not, but it's hard to call that a real failure either.  I suppose I should also be worried about whether all the legacy perks will harm the difficulty level (though I may have gone extra easy on myself this first round by playing a tank-spec with a healing companion).  Overall, though, I'd call my first month in the Old Republic a success.

The Pros and Cons of Scheduled Content

Last week's episode of STOked discussed a controversy in the Star Trek Online surrounding scheduled content.  The game has recently added some much desired additional group content, but this content has only been available at specific times through the game's event calendar.

I understand where the complaints are coming from.  It is fully understandable for players to want to play the game on their own schedule, with their own groups.  Especially in a situation where almost all of the group content that the team is developing is going into the "time-gated" calendar, players who aren't playing on the official calendar's hours are out of luck. 

The community seems quick to point the finger at Perfect World and the game's new free-to-play model.  This may be true, but it is at best an indirect effect.  Nothing in these minievents that I am aware of requires purchases in the cash shop.  Rather, the time schedule may be a legitimate attempt to help players enjoy the game - where perhaps eventually someday they might spend money. 

If you let players pick and choose their own groups, the folks with guilds will do the content they want to do, and everyone else will be stuck waiting because there is no one piece of content that everyone can agree to run.  Where most MMO's focus the random group pool by offering rewards for agreeing to run random content in the interest of forming groups faster, the scheduled content approach focuses the pool by saying that the one event is what's available at this time. 

In some ways, the approach is a stick (no access to content if it's not the right time) rather than a carrot (reward for agreeing to run a random dungeon).  However, when you look at the effects of the random system, every piece of content in games that use it now has to be designed to be easily beaten by a PUG of potentially dubious composition.  Setting aside a specific subset of content and saying that this is the stuff that any five warm bodies can clear for rewards may have less overall effect on the state of the game. 

In that case, though, the solution is as simple as it is elusive - make more content so that this one mechanic is not getting all of the limited new stuff that is being added to the game. 

Founding a Legacy

My trooper was finally able to finish Chapter One of his class story, unlocking the Legacy system.  I'd been brainstorming for a while on a legacy name that A) looks enough like a name to pass muster on an RP server and B) somehow addresses my status as a MMO nomad.  I considered various combinations of "WorldSpanner", "RealmCrosser", etc in English, and then had the idea of branching out into French. 

The result was the name "Jeutrémie", which combines the words Jeu (game) and trémie (hopper).  Technically, it's the wrong kind of hopper - this is the giant funnel-like structure that you use to load up exceptionally heavy cargo (e.g. cement, ore) - but I suppose my the analogy to my MMO habit holds regardless.  In any case, it sounds vaguely namelike and it has a pun on the theme I wanted, so I'm happy with it.

I understand the desire to have the legacy unlock - it also came with a bind-to-legacy token for a free weapon for my next alt to hit the teens - come as a special reward.  However, there was a side effect to this plan - players cannot earn exp for their legacy until it is unlocked.  The final quest in Chapter One rates at level 31, but I ended up pushing the envelope and clearing through it at level 28/29 (dinged midway through the instance, and a good thing since the final bosses were 32 elite and time-consuming). 

I suppose the wait paid off in the end.  I had a lot of fun pushing the envelope to get through those last few missions "early" (delaying the Tatooine bonus series and most of the non-story content on Alderaan until I could earn legacy exp for them).  As a tank-spec trooper with a healing companion, I can get through a lot, and that level of challenge often isn't found in the solo game of an MMO anymore.  Looking ahead, I see some tough choices on what classes to play next based on juicy perks to unlock for my legacy.  From Bioware's perspective, that's a win/win, and I guess it is for me as well.

Return of the 400,000?

There is much chatter about how SWTOR has - as Azuriel cleverly put it - lost an Eve Online's worth of customers in the last quarter.  This is roughly the first half of what I predicted at the beginning of the year - high churn.  The second half of that prediction - recurring revenue as those players return to replay the game - remains to be seen. 

Bioware is looking like it now owns the fastest MMO ever to acquire a million former players (in fact, Bioware-Mythic would own the top two slots if only Warhammer had actually made it to a million in the first place).  Many of the studio's games are well known for replayability, and this appears to be no exception - two factions, and four class stories (albeit with generic content padding out the leveling curve that is shared within the faction).  If you are coming back to experience the story, having more story left to experience is a good thing. 

That said, the short term looming crisis is to stop the bleeding.  The game is still most likely the number two Western subscription MMO, but knowing that the subscriber base is dwindling that rapidly puts a lot of what we've seen in the last months - the aggressive free game time campaign, complaints of poorly populated servers and the corresponding priority to implementing character transfers and guild features - into context.  Some of the solo-replay market won't care if they come back to a largely dead server in a game that's being viewed as a sinking ship by the "core" MMO community, but Bioware definitely does not want this to continue.

Triumph of the Flying Jetski

My SWTOR Trooper hit level 25, and obtained his first real mount over the weekend.  It looks vaguely like a giant hovering Jet Ski, and it adds 90% to my out-of-combat travel speed.  The added effect of this boost can be overstated when you consider that all characters get a permanent 35% non-combat sprint boost at level 1 as of patch 1.2.  The mount only takes half a second to activate, but it disappears nigh-instantly upon combat, so it definitely isn't worth mounting up between packs of mobs.  Still, it's a marked increase in speed while crossing the outside world.

The big black things do not appear to be functioning cannons.

The main reason why I was able to pay the 43,000 credits for the training and the vehicle was courtesy of SWTOR's crew skill system.  Each character is allowed three professions, and it appears that the intent is to take one crafting profession, one gathering profession (which procures basic materials for the corresponding crafter), and one mission skill (which procures rare materials for the crafter, and other miscellany).  However, pretty much all mission skills appear to operate at somewhat of a net loss of credits, probably to balance out the fact that you can have two or more missions going at once while AFK. 

Instead, I've gone with Slicing - an odd gathering skill that does very little for crafting but does find literal safes full of credits scattered around the landscape.  There are also slicing missions and I've had extremely mixed luck with these, generally breaking even.  (I've heard these were more lucrative in previous patches.)  While I suppose it's hard to complain about breaking even while earning skill points, in general I'm sticking to the guaranteed returns of looting lock boxes. 

Meanwhile, my other two slots are occupied with the Biochem crafting skill and Bioanalysis gathering skill.  Bioanalysis produces all the materials I need to make common medpacks (potions) and stims (longer stat buffs) with Biochem.  There are some NPC costs associated with training and materials, but in general this is a very low cost way to obtain all of my consumables.  So, I'm basically getting everything my character needs and operating at a net profit from crewskills alone, which makes all of my quest rewards and drops pure profit. 

I hear mixed things about the other crew skills, and I can't make use of any rare recipes I learn through reverse engineering (a process in which crafters are reimbursed for destroying the common items they make for skill points) for lack of the associated mission skill.  That said, I would not hesitate to recommend this particular combination to any other newbies looking to purchase their first speeder.  

Storybricks: Emergent Gameplay on Kickstarter

The Storybricks project has taken to Kickstarter, in a move that's as fascinating from the business model perspective as the tool itself.

A Twist on Kickstarter
The traditional Kickstarter model is to ask for funds because you need the funds to complete the proposed project.  For example, Ferrel needed about $4000 to publish the Raider's Companion because he wasn't able to risk fronting the cash needed for editing, art, and other costs.  Goal reached, book published.  As Tobold writes, relying on this model for funding to develop an MMO is problematic - even Storybricks' $250K ask is very low in an industry that spends more than 100 times that on a triple-A title.

Reading Psychochild's post about the campaign suggests that they're going in a slightly different direction - what I'd suggest we could call emergent gameplay in the world of Kickstarter.  They would like $250K in funding - as would any independent project - but what they're really after is $250K in revenue. The theory - I'd suggest this is the same model that led to the two recent multi-million dollar game campaigns on kickstarter - is that revenue demonstrates to investors (either third party or within the studio itself if it has the means) that they will potentially profit from putting up money now, at a comparatively early stage in the project.

The project
The Storybricks project itself is a similarly quirky approach to MMO development.  The hope is to develop an artificial intelligence system for modeling NPC reactions to other characters first and then hoping to eventually build a game - and a system for player-generated content around that.   I have little idea how that will play out in practice, but it would hopefully result in something that looks different from the rest of the MMO pack. 

The campaign runs through the beginning of June and has currently amassed over $9000 in pledges from more than 200 donors - a lot by most standards but only a small step towards $250K.  Like most Kickstarter projects, backing this effort is a kind of purchasing decision - you will not be charged if they fail to reach the goal they say they need to fund the project, and you should in principle receive the promised goods if the project is funded.  Of course, the value of some of the longer term subscriptions will likely be diminished if the team does not eventually secure additional funds, but I'm guessing that most backers know what they're getting into - a longshot that, if successful, would be genuinely innovative in a genre that hasn't shown much interested in that activity precisely because of the large amounts of money involved. 

Whatever the outcome, this is a campaign to watch - both because of the actual project and because of its implications for future attempts at Kickstarter-funding MMO's. 

Account-wide Minipets and WoW World Events

WoW's Children's Week holiday is live once again, and I finally picked up the last of the ten minipet rewards.  (I skipped the event a few years in a row back when each pet you owned took up a slot in your bank, so ironically the final pet I needed was from Vanilla.)   I went on Warcraft Pets to update my pet collection and noticed an interesting tidbit they picked up from WoW Insider. 

With the new account-wide pet feature in Pandaria, this feat will no longer need to take multiple years, as it did for me.  Rather, players with enough eligible alts will be able to collect one pet on each alt and potentially wrap up their collection in a single year.  The same change potentially affects a number of other holidays - along with the Darkmoon Faire.

• If you previously collected minipets on more than one character, obviously your workload just went down dramatically.  
• Likewise, some events have currency token limits that make it very challenging to collect all of the rewards in a single year.  With the change, you will be able to farm the pet on an alt while saving tokens from your main for stuff that is not shared (though I'm a bit fuzzy on what will and won't be shared by the time the expansion lands - mounts? achievements?).  
• If, like myself, you only collect pets on one of your characters, this change gives you a choice of increasing the rate at which you gain pets at a cost of increased time investment.  

One thing to watch is whether the time investment for future rewards increases due to this change.  For example, the current Darkmoon Faire setup awards almost half of the tokens for a minipet for a single visit to the event each month.  Currently, it isn't a huge loophole if you can collect pets on an alt you're not even playing.  If, on the other hand, the change means that I can now clean out the Faire vendors in 2 months using a pack of alts, rather than taking 6-9 months on my main alone, that's potentially a big drop in the staying power of the event.  I don't expect them to change the prices on current items - though it won't hurt to watch the beta servers just in case - but there could definitely be a change to how this works in the future. 

Subscriptions - MMO's and Cable TV

A bit of travel and an impromptu spring cleaning weekend have added up to keep me out of town and away from my new gaming rig over the last week.  My old laptop will kind of play SWTOR, but I've definitely been spending less time in game than I otherwise might have as a result.  I knew this was a possibility when I picked up the game and started my 30 day subscription (which did qualify me for the "loyalty" minipet), but I find the contrast striking.

• In LOTRO, I own access to the current expansion and all the high level content to consume at my leisure.
• After a triple station cash sale in EQ2, I now have the balance needed to pick up the "optional" expansion (required for the current AA cap increase) and pay for either gear unlocks or even a brief subscription while exploring the new content in the new patch (which most likely would have been part of the expansion, had it been ready in time for the launch window).
• In STO - which has been offering 50% bonus duty officer cxp this weekend - again, I can play at my leisure.
• In SWTOR, I had to pay for this stretch when I knew I wouldn't be in game much, because it sat on days 10-20 of my 30 day subscription.

Bioware's people swear up and down that their model - effectively the 2004 model with few changes - is the only way to finance development on the scale of their game.  But is it really the subscription that's propping the game up, or rather the sales of more than two million boxes at $40-60 each in a market where most non-subscription customers never pay a dime?  Judging from their aggressive promotional efforts, Bioware's problem with SWTOR appears to be less about getting people to try the game and more about getting them to stay.

I recognize that there are still arguments in favor of the subscription.  Even so, I can't help but notice the parallels between my recent SWTOR experience and the reasons why we got rid of our cable TV subscription.  Much like the MMO subscription, we found that we were paying a flat rate for a large bundle of stuff that we don't care about packed in with the handful of shows we do watch.  Like the MMO subscription, we were forced to pay for many days when we did not want or use the service in order to have access when we did want to do so.  Much like the SWTOR story experience, there is some content that we lose out on because its owners have not seen fit to provide it through any other channel.

Like the MMO subscription or hate it, it's starting to feel like it's on the wrong side of history.

Star Trek Online At 3 Months

Since my Klingon alt hit level 50 in STO through the duty officer system, I have been spending much less effort on flying my intrepid crew of officers around the galaxy.  By design, this is not a system anyone will ever be "done" with, but I'm getting pretty darned close. 


Progress
I have finished all of the assignment chains (including all of the officers for critical colonal chain completion) and am sitting at rank 3 or 4 in most commendations (except exploration, which recently saw several mission rewards doubled because it is harder than any of the others and not especially rewarding).  I've got 33 very rare duty officers and counting.  I'm already at the stage where I only very rarely have to send a green quality officer out on an assignment, and I am steadily converting these officers into blue quality.  Even my alt is now hitting rank 3 and collecting blue officers. 

Technically, I suppose I haven't won until I max out all the commendations (which actually go to 150K/100K, presumably as a headstart against a future rank 5) and get to run with basically an all-purple crew, but I'm rapidly getting to close enough. 

Teaming Up
On paper, there's no reason why you ever need to interact with another player to beat the duty officer system.  You can buy and sell items that are used in missions, or even officers, on the exchange, but you can also get most of what you need solo given enough time.  However, it has been fascinating to see how the system is slowly accumulating a community following - and how the developers are supporting it.

All of the sector blocks in the game get new missions every four hours.  The best missions - depending on your current goals and crew, might be anywhere on the map, and I used to spend 45-60 minutes flying around to see what I could pick up.  Apparently, I could have been leaning on a pair of custom channels - DOFFJOBS and DOFFCALLS - along with the crowdsourced tracking sheet.  At all hours of day or night, players are manually distributing this information - albeit imperfectly since you can only see missions that you quality for (due to prerequisites and cooldowns). 

The new system of NPC's on your ship who offer missions has even added a social aspect.  Now it is possible for a player who has an especially rare/desirable mission on one of their bridge NPC's to invite other players to their ship.  The very last chain I completed was the 10-part Jem'Hadar mission, in which I was stuck on the very rare 9th part for a number of weeks.  The day after I joined DOFFJOBS, someone broadcast that they had this assignment available on their ship and I was able to finally clear it out.

The Business
With my one month of subscription time safely lapsed, I can confirm that I do retain all of the bridge officer and bank/inventory slots I unlocked while leveling as a subscriber.  I did NOT, however, retain the currency cap unlock - my balance remained where it was (above the 10-million energy credit cap for non-subscribers) but I was not allowed to earn any more credits.  Due to the lack of any indication that this was occurring, I lost probably the better part of 2 million credits before discovering that I needed to purchase this unlock.

That aside, there is very little else that I see myself buying with Cryptic points.  I'm happy with my current duty roster limits, and I have no interest in participating in the "lock box" gambling that seems to be getting the lion's share of the developers' attention - this system is now even getting exclusive duty officers and assignments, but it doesn't really bother me that there are officers out there that I will never obtain. 

I'm certainly not complaining about the value I got out of the money I've spent on this game - $11.40 for an old retail box along with the points I used to unlock the currency cap and the +100 duty roster for my main.  It will be interesting, though, to see where the game goes from here.  During the three months I've been playing, the price of cryptic points has gone from just above 200 dilithium to around 300 dilithium - suggesting that the number of players earning in-game currency but not interested in paying real money into the system is growing rapidly in the post-free-to-play era.  If the only places where Cryptic is actually seeing return on their time investment is $50 ship packs and gambling boxes, this game could become a place players don't want to do business with in a hurry. 

Awaiting The Plague

A crowd dutifully awaits someone infecting us all.

SWTOR became the latest MMO to try a plague-themed live event over the last week, rolling out an outbreak of the Rakghoul plague. 

I'm not high enough in levels to actually do the content associated with this event, but it is interesting to see how a heavily story-based game handles additional content - the story leading up to the outbreak and its aftermath appears to be unfolding over the course of the week.

The part I am able to participate in is repeatedly killing my character for DNA.  Samples of the plague DNA are the event currency, and one of the best ways to be covered in plague DNA is to get infected and explode due to plague.  This process takes about 45 minutes all-told - a good control versus issues that other games have faced, since being involuntarily killed once every hour at worst is not much of a griefing issue.  In typical MMO fashion, players, myself included, are helpfully gathering in large crowds for the purpose of infecting each other and AFK-farming the DNA currency. 

So far, I've snagged a minipet and a pair of plagued cosmetic outfits for random companions (unfortunately, of classes I do not yet have, but these are bind-to-legacy).  It's not deep, and I probably wouldn't even bother if it weren't for the fact that I can passively accumulate this while doing other things (eating dinner, surfing the web, writing this very blogpost, and - in an irony that may amuse or horrify Trekkies and Star Wars fans alike - resetting my duty officer missions in Star Trek Online).  Still, it's not bad as first world events go, and perhaps a promising sign of things to come.

Finally, infected!